20th Century Fox - Have they learnt from the record industry?

My expertise (such that it is) is primarily around the logistics of moving video content around the “broadcast” industry. My expertise extends into the business models and the consumer technologies, habits and demographics as a way of understanding the drivers of the B2B market that my company sells services into. However like Joe Public I have an opinion on what was and is wrong with the broadcasting from a consumer perspective too.
So my opinion about this press release from 20th Century Fox is from my consumer perspective. Having closely followed the music industry’s consistent miss handeling of digital, the internet, MP3, consumers, artists to the extent that EMI now stands for Every Mistake Imaginable. I have observed TV trying to apply lessons learned from music to their own industry. Some of these lessons don’t apply, more in later blogs maybe. However taking the Fox press release at face value it would appear that they have learnt the lesson of bending to meet what consumers want rather than opposing it. In this case consumers (at least some) want simple and easy. I’ve paid for the content and I want to make a copy or watch on some other entertainment device then I’d like to be able to do that as simply and easily as possible. Make it difficult as record industry did with DRM and you through down a gauntlet to the “would be” hackers and you piss off some consumers most of the time and most consumers some of the time.
Make it easy, as Fox appear to be, and even if there are limitations the effort an complexity of bypassing it, is not worth the gain.
Have you ever seen that sequence in Indian Jones where someone waves a sword around skilfully and trying to threaten Jones. Jones simply shoots him. Well the one of the mistakes the record industry did was to skilfully wave DRM (Digital Rights Management) around their CD’s but with some electrical insulation tape or a dense (water soluble) black marker pen you could negate its presence on the disc. Highly skilled programmers, expensive development complicated algorithms, just so a reasonably dextrous seven year old could bypass it in seconds.